I have just spent a week at the 21st Annual WCET conference, where Steve Bronack and I did an afternoon workshop on virtual worlds and education. The workshop was co-sponsored by Innovate, which sadly closed its doors to new contributions days before the conference began.
The conference had two things going for it from the outset: downtown Denver is an exceptionally nice place by any standards, and the conference organisers, led by Megan Raymond were almost flawless at organising. It also helped that the Marriott City Center was two blocks away from 16th Street, the heart of downtown, so escaping from the conference for a few minutes during the break was both possible and enjoyable.
The Sessions
As usual these have blurred into a continuous stream of information and contacts.
I remember Chris Lott and Curt Madison talking about the idea of information fluency, and Chris talking and Ong’s ideas of secondary orality. Christen Bouffard showed a range of applications and utlities for use inside Second Life which, whether it interested anyone else or not (and it did) was just what I needed.
Since they are all from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, I was left wondering what they put in the water up there.
Richie Boyd and John Howard led a hands-on workshop on web 2.0 tools that work and are free, and I picked some very useful leads there. These overlapped with my observations of how Jared Stein was streaming the conference using UStream.tv. Either this is preposterously easy to do, or Jared made it look easy.
This is now very near the top of my list of things to explore, and his explanation of the process will be my starting point. (To keep everything in one place, here is the link to WebCamMax, which is the software that Jared uses to stream to UStream.)
Brian Lamb did a final presentation that left some people feeling he had babbled about too much in too little time, and left me feeling inspired. I felt that it was a very positive end to the conference. Among the examples he gave as he wandered over a landscape of his own making was Alan Levine’s Amazing Stories of Openness.
The Links
These are links to some of the software that I felt needed further exploration:
Dimdim is a tool that provides free webinar faciltities for groups of up to 20, and for larger groups if you subscribe. Most interestingly for me it has a plug-in that enables you to use it from inside Moodle, leaving staff and students with one URL.
ooVoo offers free video conferencing for up to 6 people at once. MeBeam, on the other hand, offers free Video conferencing for up to 16 people. They have different interfaces, and apparently they offer different video quality, but nobody in the room who had used them offered a final decision on which was better.
vWho is MeBeam wrapped up inside a social network site which might, in some cirecumstances, tilt the scales in favout of MeBeam.
One of Chris Lott’s slides mentioned Clayton Christensen who had, I confess, escaped me so far. I asked, Chris replied: the two best books (imo): _The Innovator’s Dilemma_ and _Disrupting Class_
Finally I have never seen Twitter used so effectively in a public gathering before. Not only was there an ongoing channel, that is still being used to add comments and links, and ask for further information, but Jared and the crew from Alaska were using it as a back channel, so that people outside watching the live stream could ask questions and make comments which were passed onto the speaker by the moderator. Described like this it might sound clumsy, but in practice it worked easily and effectively, without causing any problems at all.
This is also something that I will take away from Denver, and add to my toolbox.
WCET 09 was one conference I was very glad to attend: one where I met some interesting people I will hopefully continue talking with; and one that left me feeling like I definitely know more than I did a week ago.